§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

“The Congress shall have Power…To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…”

In the hearing for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, she was asked to comment upon the Constitution’s commerce clause. Senator Dianne Feinstein inquired about the extent to which the Court can restrain Congress’s use of the commerce clause to regulate anything and everything it lays eyes upon. As Senator Feinstein noted, that will become particularly important as Congress and executive branch regulatory bodies embark upon procrustean regulations under President Obama’s proposed “green” legislation.

Congressional Democrat/Socialists understandably want no Constitutional impediments to new New Deal laws and regulations that ignore citizens’ preferences while mandating, for example, what citizens may eat, which of their thoughts will be prosecuted as hate crimes, what sort of medical care they will be permitted to have, what kind of automobiles GM will be allowed to make, and what sort of automobiles citizens must purchase, along with how their homes must be constructed, heated, and cooled.

All such things can be subsumed under the commerce clause, as Congress interprets it, because almost any human activity can be said to have an effect upon interstate commerce.

Roughly 150 years’ Constitutional jurisprudence before the New Deal not withstanding, the liberal-progressive view is that Supreme Court cases in recent years have resulted in some deformity to the Constitution, to the extent that the Court